So want to guess what I’ve been doing the last month? I mean, aside from Christmas shopping and eating cookies, of course. Here, I’ll give you some choices:

Modeling underwear for Vicky’s Secret

Reading romance novels which feature on the cover men with long flowing locks and pecs like ropes of steel

Making out with Dwayne Johnson

Looking for a job

If you were a lucky recipient of my Christmas letter, you already know the answer to this. Ding, ding, ding, the answer is D!

My brand new shiny employment that I worked so hard to get last year is coming to an end. I’m not happy about it because the people I’ve met at my current job have quite literally changed my life and also, I finally got to sit in an office with a closing door and not a cube farm with no door and barely a wall. This loss was no fault of my own – our company was purchased by another company and that company already has a corporate department and so all of us corporate people will be without jobs soon. It sucks.

Now I want you to remember, it wasn’t that long ago that I was promoted to a recruiting position with my current company. Recruiting, I learned, consists of a lot of phone calls and internet searching and background screenings so it would be safe to assume that I am familiar with the entire prescreen process. And it wasn’t that long ago that I decided baking cookies on a Tuesday night was a great idea. Baking cookies on a Tuesday night, I learned, can often result in a devastating paper cut from the non-stick aluminum foil, so bad that it requires some super glue to close the skin so that I don’t bleed to death in my kitchen. These lessons are important. Bear with me.

Before I can begin my shiny new job, I had to pass a criminal background screen and get fingerprinted. I turned in all of my pertinent information to the appropriate parties and scheduled my appointment to get my fingerprints done, something that I regularly ask my potential candidates to do. Having never had it done personally, however, I was completely surprised to find that it is all done digitally now. Technologically advanced is what I am. Anyway, I showed up for my appointment with clean, super-glued hands and turned my fingertips over to the clerk. She printed my whole left hand and my whole right hand and then every finger individually on both hands. When she reached my paper cut finger, she seemed puzzled and kept smashing my finger over and over onto the scanner, which, you know, didn’t feel great.

Finally in exasperation she said, “Why does this look all white?! Why is my scanner not working?!”

I looked at her screen and with a sudden and sheepish awakening said, “Oh.”

She whipped around to glare at me and said, “What?” in a rather aggressive manner.

“Heh,” I wheezed. “Heh. See, I got a paper cut last night and so that I wouldn’t bleed to death in my kitchen, I had to super glue my skin together. Look, you can tell, right here.” And I showed her my massive, massive cut that was all covered in a gob of glue. She was void of a personality and was not amused.

Once the gob of glue was revealed, we both then made a concerted effort to really smash the very guts out of my finger onto that scanner in order to get a clear print and after some time and some pain, we did. And I passed. And I now have a new job which I will begin right after the first of the year.

P.S. I will be taking a week off in between jobs to visit with some family and some friends. I’m going to Woney’s house, and again, if you were a lucky recipient of my Christmas letter, you would know that I got cheated out of a recent visit to her so I have to make up for lost time. I know I’ve been absent for a month so I wanted to update you all as to why. If any of you need to have lunch with me in that week, though, to catch up, give me a holler. I’m down for some lunch.

We had a snow day last week. A snow day in Tennessee, whether we get ¼ inch or two feet, means that everyone buys milk, eggs and bread in bulk and piles up on the sofa under 14 blankets with some hot chocolate and a nose spray to wait out the blizzard. No one and I mean NO ONE gets on the road.